Chris Jones: “At your typical large Las Vegas casino, gambling only accounts for 34 percent of revenue. The rest of the money comes from hotel rooms, fancy restaurants, cocktail bars and, of course, more live entertainment than any other city in the world. This month on the Strip where Lady Gaga roams, you can see Gwen Stefani, Jay Leno, Janet Jackson, Cedric the Entertainer and, of course, a suite of fabulous market-segmented shows created by the Cirque du Soleil, which is constantly renewing its offerings and paying attention to the needs of all demographics.” – Chicago Tribune
Author: Matthew Westphal
Can Las Vegas Finally Get A Proper Museum Of Art Open And Running?
“It would follow an era of hope that fizzled even as casinos hosted megawatt art collections from the Guggenheim and the Smithsonian to draw tourists to the Las Vegas Strip. … There’s funding in the state budget, a matching grant of downtown land and cash from the city, a search for an architect is underway … and a newly arrived, well-connected director is gearing up a fund-raising effort that will involve naming rights.” – ARTnews
Savannah Philharmonic Names New Music And Artistic Director, Its Second Ever
“[Keitaro] Harada will replace founding Artistic Director Peter Shannon, who resigned last year. Harada, who has signed a multi-year contract, is set to conduct the opening and closing concerts of the 2019-20 season as director designate and take over the full title and responsibilities … beginning with the 2020-21 season.” – Savannah Morning News
Author George Hodgman Dead At 60 In Apparent Suicide
“[He was] a well-regarded book and magazine editor who had his own moment as a literary cause célèbre in 2015 when he published Bettyville, a memoir about caring for his aging mother that also delved into his growing up gay in a Midwestern town.” – The New York Times
The ‘Scrubber Bar’ Changes Everything About Listening To Music
That line at the bottom of the screen of a digital music player that shows the length of the recording at the right and has a cursor showing how far along you are? That’s the scrubber bar. And you can use your mouse on that cursor to skip ahead or behind to any particular point in the recording. That gives a listener control over the time element of a piece of music — and, music being a time-based art form, this (though we may not realize it) completely changes a listener’s relationship to music. Brandon Lincoln Snyder digs into that change. – NewMusicBox
‘When Harry Met Sally’ And The Invention Of The ‘High-Maintenance’ Woman
“According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it was When Harry Met Sally that popularized the term high-maintenance in American culture. … An assessment that is also a rebuke, high-maintenance is one of those breezy truisms that is so common, it barely registers as an insult. But the term today does precisely what it did 30 years ago, as backlash brewed against the women’s movement: It serves as an indictment of women who want.” – The Atlantic
The Long Road
Here’s a list of problems that sounds way too familiar to me in my work attempting to get arts organizations to understand the long road that needs to be walked to build relationships. – Doug Borwick
Propwatch: the takeaway cartons in ‘the end of history…’
I love food, but I love cooking even more. So it was remarkably upsetting to see food repeatedly announced yet never enjoyed in Jack Thorne’s new play the end of history… at the Royal Court. Each of the three acts takes place at a meal that is destined to remain uneaten. – David Jays
Rossini goes commando in Teatro Nuovo’s ‘La Gazza Ladra’
I’m a longtime Rossini skeptic, but his rock-star status during his lifetime couldn’t have been a fluke. Could the key to making his operas (beyond the two or three popular comedies) appealing lie in historical performance practice, as happened with Handel? In this case, the answer is yes. – David Patrick Stearns
New Consortium To Commission Dance Works For Art Galleries Across Britain
“CONTINUOUS Network, originally a partnership between Siobhan Davies Dance in London and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead,” and now expanding to include two more dance companies and five more galleries, “will present six new co-commissioned dance works by 2022, and tour eight existing ones, with the aim of reaching 75,000 people live or online over the next three years.” – Arts Professional